Facebook has always been a wall garden where Google’s spider crawlers have been kept off bay. Thanks to some impressive settings, you can set your profile not to be picked up by search engine such as Google. That has changed however, thanks to a report by The Wall Street Journal where the company has allowed Google to index its mobile app specifically.
The search giant has a problem: It has been able to index web pages but not apps which it has to ask for permission to let its crawlers index the information in them. They have been able to do that with Twitter and this has led to relevant tweets being part of search results.
In the case of Facebook, the content displayed will be like Twitter’s in the form of “deep links” which when click will take you directly to the content. It will show content from Pages, Groups, Events and publicly shared profiles but it won’t show content if you are logged-in. As long as your profile is private or you are logged in, your posts will not be displayed on search result.
This surprising move by Facebook can be seen as a way of making search better on the platform, which has not been good as compared to others. Recently, they have made strides by updating the search functionality on both the desktop and mobile apps where they improved it in 3 key areas.
This new collaboration will only be enjoyed by users of the Facebook Android app where if they search for any public content on the mobile web, they will be directed straight to the Facebook app.
